GeoGuessr Clues That Help You Read Real Roman Streets

Most of our guests get lost at least once in their first two days, and it is rarely because they lack a map. Their phone shows the blue dot in the right place. The trouble is that they cannot connect the screen to the street around them. Every corner looks like the last one: ochre walls, a scooter, a café with three tables outside. People tell me Rome feels beautiful and completely unreadable.

A few years ago I started noticing which guests did not have this problem. A surprising number of them played GeoGuessr, the game that drops you somewhere in Google Street View and asks you to work out where you are. They had trained themselves to read the small physical clues of a place before they ever arrived. You can borrow their habits without becoming good at the game.

Why street level clues work better than a map

A map tells you where you are in relation to things you cannot yet see. A street clue tells you something about the exact spot you are standing in. GeoGuessr players learn to look for details that are cheap to spot and hard to fake: the colour of a licence plate band, the style of a road sign, the shape of a bollard. In Rome, the city is full of these markers, and most of them are designed for exactly the purpose you need, which is telling people where they are.

The difference is that GeoGuessr players use clues to narrow down a country. You will use them to narrow down a neighbourhood, and the city happens to label its neighbourhoods on its walls.

The clues worth learning before you land

These are the ones I teach guests at check in, roughly in order of how useful they are.

• The rione number on street plaques. Street names in the historic districts are carved or painted on marble plaques fixed to building corners. Many include the name and number of the rione, the traditional district, in Roman numerals. Our neighbourhood is Rione XXII, Prati, the newest of them, created in 1921. Cross toward the Vatican and you enter Rione XIV, Borgo. Trastevere is XIII and Monti is I. Once you know your rione number, you can tell at a glance whether you have wandered out of it.
• SPQR on manhole covers. The ancient abbreviation for the Senate and People of Rome still appears on the city's drain covers and many municipal fixtures. It does not tell you which district you are in, but it is a cheap reminder that you are inside the city's own works rather than private property, which helps around the Vatican boundary.
• Sampietrini underfoot. The small square basalt cobbles, named after St Peter's Square, cover the older streets. Prati's main avenues are mostly asphalt with wide pavements, so if you are suddenly walking on cobbles and the street narrows, you have probably crossed into Borgo or the centro storico.
• Nasoni. The cast iron drinking fountains with a curved spout, the big nose that gives them their name, have been in Rome since 1874. There are around 2,500 of them across the city. They are excellent landmarks because they rarely move. Block the spout with a finger and the water jumps out of a small hole on top, which is how locals drink from them.
• Building age and height. Prati's blocks are mostly five or six storeys, built from the 1880s on, with regular windows and wide entrance doors. The streets of Borgo are lower and more irregular. GeoGuessr players call this kind of thing architecture reading, and it works at the scale of a few hundred metres.

None of these will replace your phone. They make your phone make sense.

The advice to "just get lost" and when it fails

Every travel article about Rome tells you to put the map away and get lost. I like the spirit of it, and I have written in favour of slowing down and letting the city reveal itself. But getting lost only feels good when you can get found again easily. For a guest with a 9:30 entry to the Vatican Museums, getting lost at 9:10 is not romantic.

GeoGuessr players have a nice middle ground. They wander, but they keep collecting clues as they go, so they always have a rough idea of their position. In Rome that means you can take the interesting side street, but glance at the plaque on each corner. If the rione number changes, you have learned something. If it changes twice, it might be time to look at your phone.

A practice walk you can do from home

You do not need a GeoGuessr subscription to practise, although the free version is fun for a few rounds. Open Google Maps, drag the little figure onto Via Ottaviano near the metro stop, and walk virtually toward Piazza Cavour. It takes about 15 minutes of clicking.

As you go, try to spot three things: a marble street plaque with a rione number, a nasone, and the point where asphalt turns into cobbles. Then repeat the walk from Ottaviano toward Borgo Pio, and notice how quickly the street width and building height change. When guests have done this before arriving, I can see it in how they leave the house on their first morning. They pause at the corner, look up for the plaque, and turn the right way.

If you want the bigger picture first, our guide to understanding Rome's neighbourhoods before you book explains what each area is like to stay in. For a slower first morning in the area, a morning in Prati like a local suggests a route with coffee stops.

This week, before your trip, spend 20 minutes on that virtual walk from Ottaviano to Piazza Cavour and back through Borgo. Write down the rione numbers you see and the location of one nasone. When you arrive, find that fountain on foot. It will be the first place in Rome that already feels familiar.